We Wish We Had Better News
By: Thomas N. Richmond Jr., Co-Head of Wasmer Shroeder Taxable Bond Strategies
When the best thing to be said about the second quarter of this year is that it wasn’t as bad as the same period in 2020, when lockdowns due to COVID-19 were in full effect and the global economy callapsed, it tells you a bit about how things went. While death rates and cases of serious illness remained low by pandemic standards, COVID-19 cases remained subboornly high and on the minds of many wanting to “return to normal”. The war in Ukraine dragged on, and the human toll remained socking; further, the shortages of many commodities native to that region of the world remained difficult to overcome. To make things worse, cases of seemingly random violence, including well publicized school shootings, seemed to increase as well. Not a good set of themes for an already weary public, and that doesn’t even consider the punishing levels of global inflation hitting these same weary consumers across broad product and service swaths, including in the US where the headline Consumer Price Index sits at 8.6% year-over-year. Not a pretty picture.
